Journalism Goes To The Movies
By Stephen B. Shepard
What was the best movie ever made about journalism? Until recently, the nod usually went to “All The President’s Men,” the 1976 epic about Watergate — how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two cub reporters for the Washington Post, brought down the President of the United States. It was at once a history lesson, a gripping political mystery, and a faithful look at journalism in one of its finest hours.
When I was dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism from 2006 to 2013, I sat with each incoming class to watch “All The President’s Men,” eight times in all. I showed it to inspire the students, to impress on them how hard it is to do great journalism, and to offer a glimpse of the journalistic world before the Internet, smart phones, and social media changed everything. What could be more journalistically dramatic than Woodward meeting his secret source, Deep Throat, in an underground garage? And, yes, it was glamorous: Robert Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, and Jason Robards as Post editor Ben Bradlee. Directed by Alan Pakula, it’s beautifully told with overall fidelity to the Woodward/Bernstein book of the same name, published two years earlier. The film was nominated for a best-picture Academy Award in 1977.
Now comes “Spotlight,” another terrific journalistic yarn, another Oscar nominee for best picture. “Spotlight” tells the behind-the-scenes tale of the Boston Globe’s gutsy investigation of priests who sexually abused boys, as well as the cover-up by the Catholic Church hierarchy in Boston. Once again, we see the hard chores of investigative journalism: the legwork of knocking on doors, of digging through archives, of interviewing people who don’t want to talk, of facing threats, of self-doubt. And once again, we see a heroic editor, Marty Baron, rallying the troops to keep pushing. I confess to having tears in my eyes near the end of the film, when the presses started rolling with the remarkable story bursting from the Globe’s front page in 2002.
Yet when I left the theater after watching “Spotlight,” I found myself thinking less about the triumph of journalism than about the moral collapse of the Catholic Church. The film is searing and personal, much more so than the Watergate story, and thus a more vivid experience. We squirm as men recall in detail the sexual trauma of their youth. We sympathize as ordinary people of faith struggle to come to terms with the crimes of the Church. And we wince as the four main reporters, all of them lapsed Catholics, confront their feelings as they learn the horrible truth.
Director Tom McCarthy stresses the Church’s role in the film’s ending crawl, a kind of where-are-they-now postscript. It listed all the other cities around the world that had uncovered sexual abuses by priests — an astonishing roster of dozens of places from Albany to Yakima. The postscript also told us that Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the Boston prelate who made sure the abuses were covered up and who re-assigned the predator priests to other parishes, was quietly transferred to a cushy post in Rome. The update was welcome, even necessary. But nowhere in the postscript crawl was any mention of Marty Baron or of the four main reporters who did such extraordinary work. How long did Baron stay at the Globe? Where is he now? What happened to the reporters? Did the Globe win a Pulitzer Prize?
(For the record, Marty Baron remained as editor of the Globe for another 10 years; he is now executive editor of the Washington Post. Three of the four main reporters in the film are still at the Globe, while the fourth left in 2014 for the MIT Media Lab. And the Globe did win the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for Public Service, the same award the Washington Post won in 1973 for its Watergate reporting.)
My feelings were very different after watching the Woodward/Bernstein saga, lo those many times. I didn’t think much about the Nixon White House or of John Mitchell and the others going to jail. It was strictly about the journalism: what it took to get the story and the courage to stick with it. In fact, the film ends well before Nixon’s downfall — before the Congressional hearings, before Judge Sirica, before the White House tapes.
The two films are distinct in other ways, too. It’s hard to imagine two editors more different than Bradlee and Baron. The waspy Bradlee was larger than life, a Washington fixture who was a JFK friend and man-about-town. He was handsome and debonair — the very picture of patrician authority, the very model of newspaper editor as swashbuckling hero. Bradlee’s stature perfectly suited his larger role, riding shotgun against the highwaymen of the Nixon White House.
By contrast, Baron was an itinerant newsman, a newcomer to Boston, an outsider. As a character in the film puts it, Baron was “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith, who hates baseball.” As portrayed by Liev Schreiber (rather accurately, by all accounts), Baron is shy and recessive, a man of few words. Nor does he appear to have any friends or outside interests. He seems smaller than life.
The film reinforces this impression. Baron is rarely on screen, and even then he’s usually seen from a distance in his office, quietly working away. Yet, on his first day at the Boston Globe, Baron mentions to a group of reporters on the newspaper’s Spotlight investigative unit that he had read a piece by a Globe columnist about a predatory priest whose case file had been sealed by a court. Why, he asks, no follow-up story? Why not sue to overturn the court’s secrecy order?
The Spotlight team, headed by Walter (Robby) Robinson, gets to work. In one of the film’s small ironies, they report to the assistant managing editor, who turns out to be Ben Bradlee, Jr., son of the great man in Washington. But this Bradlee is no chip off the old block. He is reluctant to challenge the Church, a powerful force in heavily Catholic Boston, but he eventually goes along with the fast-moving flow. Baron has no such reservations. His personality perfectly suited his role: to empower the experienced reporters on the Spotlight team, offer timely encouragement, pay close attention, an have final say on the copy.
The Watergate story unfolded differently. At first it was nothing more than a strange break-in at the office of the Democratic Party during the run-up to the 1972 Presidential election. As it metastasized into something much larger, Bradlee took on a bigger role. Woodward and Bernstein, after all, were rookies on the Metro desk, with no experience covering national news or, really, much of anything. And Bradlee, too, had some reluctant underlings, editors who at first thought the story of the Watergate break-in was no big deal and later felt Bradlee should reassign the story to more-experienced national reporters. But Bradlee, pushed by Metro Editor Harry Rosenfeld, stuck with “the boys,” partly because it was they who found and developed the story when no one else was paying attention.
Both films artfully remind us why good journalism matters. Yet there is no escaping the angst many of us feel now that newspapers are in such sharp decline, jeopardizing the in-depth local reporting that sparked both the Watergate and Church stories. The business model that once supported journalism has eroded to the point that newspapers have lost more than one-third of their reporters. Did the image of the Globe’s printing press bring me to tears because of the power of great journalism? Or was it nostalgia for the old world? Or fear for the future of journalism?
In theory, journalism can remain strong in the Internet age, long after the printing press has gone the way of silent movies. Digital journalism, after all, does have many advantages, including instant delivery, mobility, multimedia presentation, and audience engagement via social media. Moreover, even as traditional newspapers shed reporters, new jobs are springing up at dozens of advertising-supported journalistic outlets that didn’t exist when the Globe broke the Church story in 2002 — from BuzzFeed and Vice to Politico and Vox. They often do outstanding work. And some of the new outlets are dedicated to investigative reporting, like Pro Publica, the Texas Tribune, and the Center for Investigative Reporting — though all are supported by philanthropy, which is hardly a workable business model for journalism writ large.
There are exceptions, but generally speaking, I fear something is missing in the larger world of digital journalism, something in its cultural DNA. The digital-first game is all about boosting traffic via social media and getting a story to go viral. Some newsrooms, including those in mainstream media, are installing big screens that show in real time how many page views a story gets or how many unique visitors it attracts, even if the visitor shows his uniqueness by staying less than two minutes. There is no big screen for journalistic quality.
The danger is clear. Because we can now measure how much traffic a story gets, pressure exists to write only those stories that score well on today’s metrics. Stories that don’t measure up, no matter how important, are less likely to get done in the first place. Imagine this: If the early Woodward/Bernstein stories on the little-noticed Watergate break-in were held to a traffic test, the Post’s coverage probably would never have gained traction. Yes, good stories sometimes draw strong traffic, but something fundamental has changed. Like television, journalism is in danger of becoming a ratings game.
That suggests we’re headed for more lowest-common-denominator journalism. In the traffic-driven world of Facebook, it’s still an open question whether many journalistic outlets will muster the values and willpower to take on time-consuming investigative projects. Maybe that’s why the image of the printing press at the Boston Globe brought tears to my eyes.
******************************************************************
Stephen B. Shepard is founding dean emeritus at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He was a senior editor of Newsweek and editor-in-chief of Business Week. He is the author of “Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path From Print To Digital.”
